


Visiting Hours

by gardnerhill



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visiting Hours

**Author's Note:**

> For JWP 2013 Prompt #6: “Futility” by Wilfrid Owens:
> 
>  __Move him into the sun —  
>  Gently its touch awoke him once,  
>  __At home, whispering of fields unsown.  
>  Always it woke him, even in France,  
> Until this morning and this snow.  
> If anything might rouse him now  
> The kind old sun will know.
> 
>  __Think how it wakes the seeds —  
>  Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.  
> Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides  
> Full-nerved, — still warm, — too hard to stir?  
> Was it for this the clay grew tall?  
> — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil  
> To break earth's sleep at all?  
> 

I’m sorry it’s been so long. I’ve been very busy with my new job. But I haven’t forgotten you, I promise.

It has been a while – the grass is in big clumps, the flowers are withered, the ants keep marching. But I came prepared. And how sad is it that yours is still the best-looking plot in this miserable little yard? A few moments with the clippers and whisk broom, some fresh flowers, and you’ll be good-looking again, John Doe 221.

I know – if only I’d taken this kind of care, before, when it mattered. Neither of us would be here right now. I’d have dismissed you fifty patients ago, still showing off in the OR, still the smartest person in the room, still the Head Bitch in Charge.

It’s wrong that my humility lesson cost your entire life.

My new job has some good side-effects – I’ve learned so far that you’d been in Vietnam, that you’d travelled to Korea and Hong Kong as well as your theater of operations, that you’d turned to heroin when you got home, and then to methadone. You have no next-of-kin, you’d been homeless for at least 10 years before they brought you in, and if I’d paid an extra moment of attention to my work I would have identified that clot in your renal artery before I yanked out the tumor that loosed it and caused the stroke on the table.

A lot of people thought I over-reacted – patients die, Joanie, you can’t save all of them, that sort of thing.

But I’d sworn, even as I started pre-med, that if I wasn’t going to be the best – that if I ever stopped doing my very best – then I would walk away from it all. Great impetus to keep doing my best, right? Except when it wasn’t.

It’s not the fact that you died. It’s that you died because you got me for your doctor. It’s that your life was one of hardship and lost family and the horrors of war and its aftermath and addiction, and your death by a botched operation didn’t affect anyone else at all. If I’d just gone back to the next patient and saved his or her life, and gone on being a surgeon…that would mean that you’d lived, and died, for nothing at all.

But your life and death have affected one person in the world. Your life and death had the effect of stopping my chosen career. Your life and death had an effect, and a consequence, and here it is before you. Someone still alive changed because of you, remembers you, thinks about you, will learn as much about you as possible. Yours will not be a futile life and death.

I haven’t yet figured out your real name. But I’m getting the skills for that, and someday I will.

Ah, that looks much better. Again, Mr. Doe 221, I’m very sorry for the delay in my return. But I’m still looking for you. And one day I will come here and say your real name.

See you next month.

***

So you are John Doe Number 221. She wouldn’t know why that number makes me smile, but she will soon.

She’s in the library today; tonight I’ll see if she can deduce where I’ve been. I’ll try not to make it too easy for her – no parking stubs, no flower petals from her bouquet on my person. I like the sprig of rosemary; a nice literary touch.

It’s easy to see that you are her former patient – yours is the neatest, best-kept plot in a pauper’s cemetary.

I know that she continues to research you – and someday she hopes to pay for a stone that has your birth-name on it. I will not help her, of course; this is her quest.

But I came by here to present myself to you. I wished to visit the person who indirectly caused the most important and valuable change in my life.

If she had saved you, she would be a surgeon still, and not a sober companion. I would have been assigned someone else, and I doubt I would have been lucky enough to find someone else with her intelligence, her wisdom, her courage, her patience, and her blunt refusal to be browbeaten. She is no longer my sober companion, but only because of the changes she made in my life was I open to accept Alfredo Llamosa’s help. I am not simply sober, but happy to be so.

And because she has joined me in my work, I am better at what I do and am more helpful. We have saved lives and brought clarity to cold cases, punished the wicked and seen justice done – only because Ms Watson was by my side, and was not Dr. Watson working on her next patient completely unaware of what went on outside of her OR.

Your existence may very well be the sole reason that a criminal mastermind is in prison now, Mr. Doe 221.

And she would not be at my side if it were not for you.

I will let her find you on her own. But when she knows your name, I will help her select the marble for your monument, and hope she will let me help pay for it.

Because I am more grateful to you than I can possibly say. 


End file.
